Cristiano on Tech/Life

So a few days ago I blogged about how I was without broadband. It seemed then that NatWest and Orange couldn’t figure out how to do banking and I, the customer, was stuck in the middle. More than an hour of phone calls with both BT and Orange didn’t seem to lead to much besides my blood pressure rising higher and higher.

I was already looking for new broadband options at work when I got a call by Mr Britton from Orange. He had gotten my lengthy email that I had send to the CEO of Orange and had done some digging around. He gave me a lengthy apology explaining because I was right: they were indeed competent enough to do banking in the UK. He then offered me two options: apply for a different ISP to provide me my broadband, or let Orange reinstate me as a customer as quickly as they could.

Getting a different provider to hook us up again would probably have taken a few weeks as they don’t seem interested in giving you fast service in this country. So instead I decided to let Orange reconnect us, with the option to change provider afterwards if we wanted to. Two days later we’re reconnected completely, got our VOIP phone line reinstated (although with a different number) and we’re now pondering wether to still switch to O2 broadband or not.

It’s amazing how some of these service providers barely know at the front what the back is doing. The fact that I initially got connected to a service centre in India proves to me that Orange is unwilling to give their support team members any power to actually “do good if they deem it worthy”. Fortunately other companies do seem to understand that customer support is what actually makes their product.

Companies like Zappos (shoes) and Moo (business cards) live of their community and understand that keeping that community close to hart is what makes their company worth more than their competitors. I wonder when broadband providers and other service providers are going to understand that customer support should be a bigger part of the business plan than throttling data packages….